Synaesthesia in a logographic language: The colouring of Chinese characters and Pinyin/Bopomo spellings

Simner, Julia; Hung, Wan-Yu; Shillcock, Richard

doi:10.1016/j.concog.2011.05.006

Cited by 14 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 55 publications

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“…Characters are assigned one of four tones: 'high', 'rising', 'falling-then-rising', and 'falling' tone, and these tones are transcribed in phonetic spelling systems with the digits 1-4, respectively (e.g., 木 = [mu4] 'tree'; 湯 = [tang1] 'soup'). Simner et al (2011) found no influence of tones in synaesthetic colouring, and so we consider here another feature of Chinese characters. The majority of Chinese characters are compounds composed of two sub-components known as radicals (Hsiao & Shillcock, 2006;Li & Kang, 1993).…”

Section: Overview Of Chinesementioning

confidence: 60%

“…Thirdly, Asano and Yokosawa did not consider hue, saturation and luminance separately and they also used a reduced palette of 138 colours (rather than the >16,000,000 colours available in our study); these authors therefore acknowledged that this factor may have "reduced the sensitivity of the experimental results to the real effects" (Asano & Yokosawa, 2012). Nonetheless, their elegant study highlights a number of other important influences on the synaesthetic colouring of Japanese, some of which have also been shown to operate in Chinese (e.g., an influence of phonetic spellings; Simner et al, 2011).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For the purposes of our study, participants' consistency was judged over three presentations of 75 simple characters (see Materials for further descriptions of these characters). Since our previous work (Simner et al 2011) shows that Chinese characters tend to be coloured less consistently than, say, English letters (perhaps because the former comprise a set of around 2000-3000 items for everyday use), we chose our cut-off for synaesthesia in Chinese to be a standardised consistency score of 1.5 or lower (We point out nonsynaesthete grapheme-colour synaesthetes still typically score above 2; Eagleman et al, 2007. ) Using this criterion, we rejected 48 additional participants who claimed to have synaesthesia but did not meet the consistency criterion for inclusion.…”

Section: Test Of Genuinenessmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Synaesthesia in Chinese characters: The role of radical function and position

Hung¹,

Simner²,

Shillcock³

et al. 2014

Consciousness and Cognition

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Grapheme-colour synaesthetes experience unusual colour percepts when they encounter letters and/or digits. Studies of English-speaking grapheme-colour synaesthetes have shown that synaesthetic colours are sometimes triggered by rulebased linguistic mechanisms (e.g., B might be blue). In contrast, little is known about synaesthesia in logographic languages such as Chinese. The current study shows the mechanisms by which synaesthetic speakers of Chinese colour their language. One hypothesis is that Chinese characters might be coloured by their constituent morphological units, known as radicals, and we tested this by eliciting synaesthetic colours for characters while manipulating features of the radicals within them. We found that both the function (semantic vs. phonetic) and position (left vs. right) of radicals influenced the nature of the synaesthetic colour generated. Our data show that in Chinese, as in English, synaesthetic colours are influenced by systematic rules, rather than by random associations, and that these rules are based on existing psycholinguistic mechanisms of language processing.

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Section: Overview Of Chinesementioning

confidence: 60%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Test Of Genuinenessmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Synaesthesia in Chinese characters: The role of radical function and position

Hung¹,

Simner²,

Shillcock³

et al. 2014

Consciousness and Cognition

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“…As is generally the case for literature on grapheme-color synesthesia, the search for the determinants of synesthetic color has been pursued mostly by testing synesthetes whose first language is English. Only a handful of studies have been conducted on grapheme-color synesthetes who experience colors with nonEnglish languages such as German (Emrich et al, 2004), Hebrew (Cohen-Kadosh et al, 2007), Korean (Kim and Kim, 2009), and Chinese (Hung, 2013;Hung et al, 2013;Simner et al, 2011). There are also few studies of English-speaking grapheme-color synesthetes who also experience colors with characters of multiple different languages such as Irish Gaelic, French, German, Italian (Barnett et al, 2009), Greek (Rich et al, 2005), Russian (Mills et al, 2002;Witthoft and Winawer, 2006), and Chinese (Hung, 2013;Ramachandran and Hubbard, 2003).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Both “나” and “な” are yellow: Cross-linguistic investigation in search of the determinants of synesthetic color

Shin

Kim

2014

Neuropsychologia

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“…Simner and colleagues (Simner et al, 2011) found that both native and non-native Chinese speakers with synesthesia experience colors with Chinese characters. Again, these linguistic-to-color associations show (non-random) patterns of associations.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Color associations for days and letters across different languages

et al. 2014

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While colors are commonplace in everyday metaphors, relatively little is known about implicit color associations to linguistic or semantic concepts in a general population. In this study, we test color associations for ordered linguistic concepts (letters and days). The culture and language specificity of these effects was examined in a large group (457) of Dutch-speaking participants, 92 English-speaking participants, and 49 Hindi-speaking participants. Non-random distributions of color choices were revealed; consistencies were found across the three language groups in color preferences for both days and letters. Interestingly, while the Hindi-speaking participants were presented with letter stimuli matched on phonology, their pattern of letter-to-color preferences still showed similarities with Dutch- and English-speaking participants. Furthermore, we found that that the color preferences corresponded between participants indicating to have conscious color experiences with letters or days (putative synesthetes) and participants who do not (non-synesthetes). We also explored possible mechanisms underlying the color preferences. There were a few specific associations, including red for “A,” red for “Monday,” and white for “Sunday.” We also explored more general mechanisms, such as overall color preferences as shown by Simner et al. (2005). While certainly not all variation can be explained or predicted, the results show that regularities are present in color-to-letter or color-to-day preferences in both putative synesthetes and non-synesthetes across languages. Both letter-to-color and day-to-color preferences were influenced by multiple factors. The findings support a notion of abstract concepts (such as days and letters) that are not represented in isolation, but are connected to perceptual representational systems. Interestingly, at least some of these connections to color representations are shared across different language/cultural groups.

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Synaesthesia in a logographic language: The colouring of Chinese characters and Pinyin/Bopomo spellings

Cited by 14 publications

References 55 publications

Synaesthesia in Chinese characters: The role of radical function and position

Synaesthesia in Chinese characters: The role of radical function and position

Both “나” and “な” are yellow: Cross-linguistic investigation in search of the determinants of synesthetic color

Color associations for days and letters across different languages

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